Maybe it was the way he told me he loved me over and over again as I felt him explode inside me.
I arched against him, shaking and shivering as I found my release. We came together, almost as if his body had told me what to do and when to do it. It felt so good. So right. I knew I had made the right decision.
“I love you, Molly.”
I fell asleep in his arms.
Chapter Twenty
Jack
“So, this is it.”
Callaway stood there, looking like a weasel in a hen house. I shook my head. He’d always been the wildest of all of us, which was saying something.
And now the wild child was ready to settle down. In fact, he was dead-set on it. He’d even taken his girl’s kid brother under his wing, helping the kid with physical therapy and wheeling him around town in his wheelchair.
They made quite a pair, a clean-cut kid who looked sixteen but was mentally twelve, and the tattoo-covered guy in leather and ripped denim who usually sported some sort of variation on a mohawk minus the shaved sides. Callaway had big hair. Almost as big as his personality.
But he and the Tommy had hit it off. And he was in love with the girl, that much was plain. Now that he was house hunting, I had to do my best to support him. Callaway might be crazy, but he was loyal to a fault and surprisingly good with the kids. He’d gotten the bug when he met Whiskey and Becky’s girl the first time. And now the man had babies on the brain.
“It’s perfect.”
He turned in a circle, taking in the mid-century ranch house. It was dated and there was a lot of work to do, but it was a good lot on a quiet family-oriented street, with plenty of older SOS guys living in the area. A little more rural than suburban and not far from Donnie and Sally’s place, right next door to his mom and sister. Spitting distance from the place I was secretly fixing up for Janet, in fact.
“How did you even know about it?”
“The house belonged to a club guy’s aunt. It’s a good neighborhood. My place is just down the block, and Donnie is less than half a mile from here.”
“I noticed. Molly will love that.”
“Janet will too. Those two have gotten thick these past few weeks.”
And they had. Not that it surprised me. Janet was definitely not short on friends like Molly was, but Callaway’s lady was a great girl. She was sweet and hardworking. The kids loved her too. We all pretty much thought she was a magician. She’d somehow tamed Callaway, almost by accident. She had succeeded where a thousand women had failed. And she did it without even trying, from what I could tell.
“Tell him I’ll take it.”
“You wanna haggle?”
Callaway had that crazy gleam in his eye he used to get right before a bender. He’d slide up to the bar and ask Donnie for an entire bottle. And now that Donnie’s cousin Mac was manning the bar late nights, he was all too familiar with the look he had in his eyes right now.
It meant that Callaway was all-in. Not with partying these days. Just all-in with this house, settling down, everything.
“No. Just tell him I’ll take it.”
“You getting a mortgage? He’ll need to see something on paper for that.”
“Cash. I can give it to him tomorrow.”
I raised a brow. This was whole-hog, even for Callaway. But try talking to a man in love. I just shook my head.
“You got it, man.”
“Let’s go work on those cabinets for your place. They still at Whiskey’s?”
I nodded. “Moving them over to install in a few days.”
“Perfect. I’ll help you finish them up.”
“You figure if you help me a lot with my house, I’ll help with yours, eh?”
He grinned at me.
“Hell, no. You would have helped me anyway.”
I grumbled ‘cheeky bastard’ under my breath, but other than that, I didn’t say much. The cheeky bastard was right. We Riders stuck together. Even Crazy Callaway. He was my brother for life and he knew it.
An annoyingly wild little brother who had screwed his way through legions of women, but a brother all the same. He slapped my back and I glared at him.
“Come on, Jack. Let’s get to work.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Janet
“We need to pass out these notices about shots and flu season.”
Molly nodded, accepting the brightly-colored photocopies we’d made earlier. They pretty much said that if your kid was sick, to keep them home. Also, if you weren’t getting shots, we reserved the right to keep the kids out of a class. That only happened when we had a kid with a weakened immune system who needed to be protected, but it had come up a few times and we needed to be upfront about our policy.